Taming the Horse
(Xun Ma)

“This is my friend Dong, who is into rock’n roll and everything that leads to freedom.” Gu Tao visits his childhood friend for his thirtieth birthday, ten years after promising to return with him to his native village in inner Mongolia. For financial reasons, his family had migrated to Kunming in southern China. The journey finally gets underway, but it reveals above all else the existential wanderings of Dong, who lives for “nothing but love”, preferably in the plural, unpredictable and passionate. Squeezed into his irremovable black perfecto jacket, jobless and pressured to find work by his family and a brother who has done “very well for himself”, he unenthusiastically starts a business trading in jade. The closeness between the filmer and filmed opens up the experience to the most intimate and fluctuating relationship of trust. Torn between disappointed aspirations and a difficult adaptation to China’s rapid pace of change, Dong remains unconsciously resistant to the world surrounding him. Marginalised, with no illusions. AR